UNDER THE BANNER OF GOD: JOHN KRAKAUER

I have been wanting to read this book for a couple of years because I wanted to learn more about Mormonism and also, since both Romney and Huntsmen are Mormons running for President, I thought it was relevant.  Unfortunately, it's not as much about Mormonism as I thought, though I did get the rudiments of its founding by Joesph Smith, its stabilizing by Brigham Young, and its influence in contemporary US.  It's more about religious fanatics, generally, but specifically, about a couple of crazy Mormons, two brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who killed their brother's wife and baby because God told them to do this.  The rest of the book goes into their background, how these two crazies ended up believing God talked through them, to their trial, retrial, and their stories.  They are certainly not mainstream Mormons, rather the fringe, the fundamental Mormons, who want to go back to the Mormonism of Joseph Smith, when it was pure...sound familiar, this idea that something was pure and good in the past but has now been corrupted.

I was most interested in Joseph Smith, enough to maybe read Fawn Brodie's biography of him.  It's hard to believe that anyone took him seriously...finding golden tablets with God's words and commandments on it, that disappear miraculously once Joseph copies them down.  I guess Christianity must have seemed just as silly at its beginnings.  But once people start believing, once more and more accept, on faith, the stories, a cult becomes a religion if enough people believe it.  Mormonism is quintessentially American, the only new religion to have taken hold anywhere in the world, I think in the past 150 years.  For sure, the only new religion to take hold in the US.  There most controversial tenet, polygamy or taking plural wives, was a belief that Joseph, in his later years, because of his need for younger women, especially virgins, made law when he was told by God that this was the way men and women were meant to live.  It sounds like the cart came before the horse, the lust before the sanctity of the belief but, hey, who am I to doubt a a religion, that has over 60,000 young people out all over the world trying to convert the world's people to their beliefs.  I cannot say I found out much about every day Mormons, the kind that I assume Huntsmen and Romney have become, but I do get the impression that they feel superior, the chosen, and are a bit clannish, preferring their fellow Mormons to people who are not Mormons.  Not so different I suppose from Judaism or Christianity I suppose.  I am glad I read it though I got tired of the two Lafferty's, their craziness, the justifying their actions.  One actually developed the idea in prison that he was the prophet who heralded the second coming, that prison was God's way of preparing him and others for the final judgment.  In fact, God told him this.  What a world.